


Hot Metal and Methedrine

by AdelaCathcart



Series: Violators [8]
Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust - Philip Pullman, The Collectors - Philip Pullman
Genre: Barnard-Stokes Business, Blasphemy, Canon Compliant, Emotional Brinkmanship, F/M, Goodbye Sex, Mad Scientists, Oral Sex, Pre-Canon, We couldn't work together you and I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:08:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24327820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelaCathcart/pseuds/AdelaCathcart
Summary: “It’s extraordinary.” Her beautiful eyes are round and gleaming, and she’s breathing rapidly, which might be from fear or desire. She comes close to him, lifting her chin so she can look into his face. She smells of hot solder and summertime. “I want to kiss you so badly,” she whispers.Asriel folds his palms around her jaw and presses his mouth to hers, incandescent with pride and inspiration and utterly ravenous. Forgetting to be gentle, he crushes her body against his, wanting to subsume her, to be subsumed, to combine their two essences into some creature never before imagined, because no two minds such as theirs have met before to imagine it: something eight-limbed, two-headed, winged and terrible, radiant and absolutely new. Then he hears her joints pop from the pressure of his arms; he quickly releases her and the angelic vision dissipates like smoke. Without his embrace to steady her, she shudders.“They’ll destroy you for this, Asriel.”
Relationships: Lord Asriel/Marisa Coulter
Series: Violators [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610350
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	Hot Metal and Methedrine

At dawn Asriel had barreled into his laboratory entirely certain he knew how to make the device work, but by early afternoon he doesn’t have the faintest idea. He’s not ready to admit defeat: he leaves for the North first thing tomorrow morning, the rest of his equipment is already packed and stowed, this is the last thing he needs to do and he won’t be happy until it's been done. So he rolls up his shirtsleeves, and while creamy sunbeams creep across the room through the big north-facing windows, he switches out the vacuum tubes, extends the trumpet-shaped antenna, gives himself a couple of bad anbaric shocks, and makes absolutely no discernible progress. When the knock comes at the door around teatime he curses under his breath.

“My lord, you have a visitor,” Thorold announces, trying to be circumspect.

“Show him in,” says Asriel impatiently, but Stelmaria is already on her feet, and the golden monkey is bounding through the door as soon as it cracks open, followed by Marisa, who moves more reluctantly, wearing a loose bruise-colored dress and a wary expression. When the servant withdraws she locks the door behind him.

“You invited me to come today, you know,” she says tonelessly. “You forgot, didn’t you?”

“What?” He's not quite listening yet, and the word is garbled by the pencil in his teeth.

“Never mind. What is that?”

“It’s for detecting certain types of anbaromagnetic radiation.”

“Your own design?”

“Yes. But it’s picking up a lot more background noise than I’d like. This isn’t the ideal place to calibrate it of course, the city is riddled with Marconi interference, but I haven’t time to bring it to the chapel in Oxford before I leave and doing it in the field is out of the question.”

“May I take a look?”

“You?” he asks, raising the gold spectacle loupes he’s wearing and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“I’ve a bit of a knack for mechanical things. The long-range microwave receiver at St. Sophia’s—I worked on that, not that you’d know, Jordan scholars don’t seem to take much interest in discoveries made by the women’s colleges.”

He offers her his seat and she scoots up to the desk, adjusting the work lamp and putting the headset on. “Could you hand me the… yes, thanks,” she says as he passes her a tiny screwdriver. With expert delicacy, she begins to dismantle the device. “What do you intend to use this for exactly?”

“To study the effects of solar flares on the Aurora.”

“Yes, you showed me the grant proposal. You know, I’ll be able to calibrate it more effectively if you tell me the truth about what it's supposed to do. It’s far more sensitive than what you’d really need for solar activity…”

He leans against the desk with his arms crossed and stares at her, wondering whether anything he could say at this point would prevent her from guessing the truth, and how much harm she could do with that information if she chose. She’s peering avidly into the swing-arm magnifying glass, one hand cupping the headset to her ear as she tests the circuits one by one with a multimeter, and narrating to herself.

“No, that’s not it… There? No… It must be something heretical, or else you wouldn’t be so secretive about it. Not that one… Something to do with that geological sample you found, the one you said shouldn’t exist? It is, isn’t it?” Before he can answer she smiles down at her work like a proud mother. “Aha! There you are. Get me that solvent, Asriel, would you please?”

He retrieves the canister from a glass-fronted cabinet and offers it to her and she reaches without looking up, but then suddenly she plucks off the headset and her empty hands drop open to the desk. She sits bolt upright and stares directly into his face, her expression slack with astonishment.

“You’re looking for proof of other worlds,” she says quietly.

All he can do is laugh. “I’m not sure I was wise to let you look at this. You’re really quite a dangerous woman, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she says mildly. Then, growing excited again: “But how…? I know there are purely mathematical arguments for the theory, but they’re not exactly philosophical, are they? Totally unfalsifiable. Unless…”

“To overlap with our own, a parallel world would have to possess different fundamental physical constants,” he prompts her.

“Which when it intersected with ours… could manifest as a faint bubble of anbaromagnetic radiation,” she finishes, standing shakily.

“That’s what I'm going to find out.”

“But you could never publish findings like that. The whole thing is patently heretical.”

“Oh, I’ve no intention of publishing it,” he scoffs.

“Then what…?”

“I’m going to put it into practice.”

She looks at him sideways, incredulous. “You’re not going to actually try and cross?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“For one thing, if this other world has different physical constants from ours it would be impossible for matter to pass between them.”

“That’s what we’d always assumed. But I found indications in the geological record as well, as I think you’ve guessed. Physical contact between the worlds is possible. In fact I believe it’s been done before.” The monkey visibly flinches, but Asriel is too delighted by his own wild ambition to give it a second thought. “I’m going to discover the nature of that contact, and then I'm going to replicate it. Not only that—I'll expand it. I’m not just going to travel from one world to another, Marisa. I’m going to eradicate the boundary between them.”

“It’s extraordinary.” Her beautiful eyes are round and gleaming, and she’s breathing rapidly, which might be from fear or desire. She comes close to him, lifting her chin so she can look into his face. She smells of hot solder and summertime. “I want to kiss you so badly,” she whispers.

Asriel folds his palms around her jaw and presses his mouth to hers, incandescent with pride and inspiration and utterly ravenous. Forgetting to be gentle, he crushes their bodies together, wanting to subsume her, to be subsumed, to combine their two essences into some creature never before imagined, because no two minds such as theirs have met before to imagine it: something eight-limbed, two-headed, winged and terrible, radiant and absolutely new. Then he hears her joints pop from the pressure of his arms; he quickly releases her and the angelic vision dissipates like smoke. Without his embrace to steady her, she shudders.

“They’ll destroy you for this, Asriel.”

“Only if you run to your husband’s cronies in the Magisterium about it.”

She snorts softly. “I might as well tell them you've gone to the North Pole looking for Father Christmas. But if you do discover a way to cross, and they find out… You'll be excommunicated. You could be killed.”

“That won't matter. They won’t be able to hide what I’ve done.”

Frowning, she lets her head rest on his shoulder and holds him tightly. "This is abetting, me being here, isn’t it? I'm every bit as guilty as you are. If I exposed it you’d only bring me down alongside you.”

“And enjoy every second of it,” he chuckles, tipping her chin up to draw her mouth back to his. “What was the matter with the device, anyway?”

“The interference you heard was from sloppy wiring. You got overexcited and rushed it, as usual…” He’s kissing the side of her neck now, too wetly, and has to slurp to keep from drooling down her collar, which makes her gasp. She tilts her head so he can progress to her throat, and he feels the vibration against his lips as she speaks. “If I were you I’d give it an oscilloscope.”

“An oscilloscope!” Immediately, he turns his back on her to rummage in one of the lower cabinets behind the desk, already half-believing this clever innovation is his own. “I ought to have one in here that could be easily repurposed…”

“Better let me,” she suggests, tucking her hair behind her ears and slipping back into the desk chair.

“If you like. There’s a butane torch and flint in the top left drawer. Solder is in the yellow envelope.”

It’s captivating to watch her work: once the tools are arrayed, her hands move over them with the easy confidence of a pianist at a favorite piece; she seems to have a facility with his creation which even he himself does not. The monkey, perched at her elbow on the desktop, anticipates her wishes as attentively as a surgical nurse, wiping this, moving that aside, rarely needing to be asked once, and never twice. Asriel crouches beside them on the floor with the oscilloscope in his lap, openly staring, and wonders for the first time in his life what it would feel like to be a different person, to have a dæmon with an old man’s face and tiny, meticulous hands.

“I’m disconnecting the audio output to try out the oscilloscope, but of course you can add a second port and use both at once if you prefer,” she informs him. He places the machinery on the edge of the desk, and she clips it to the bare wire, then cranks the device and flips the switch that makes it whir to life. The vacuum tubes begin to glow, and the oscilloscope readout expands from a luminous blue pinprick to a shallow, furry waveform. Lifting her foot into his lap, Asriel delicately unbuckles the slim ankle strap of her shoe. “That’s odd. It’s still picking up something,” she says, ignoring him.

“The signal’s much cleaner than it was,” he observes, slipping the shoe off and tossing it aside. He kisses her ankle through a sheer gray stocking, breathes hot on the inside of her knee, and lets his hands drift under her skirt to unbutton her garter. Peeling the stocking away he sucks her inner thigh, and she sighs and puts down her tools, and hooks her naked leg around him. With a heel on his back she pulls him close to her.

“Yes,” she sighs, but whether she means it for the machine or the man it’s impossible to guess.

He nuzzles her cunt through her clothes, but there are too many layers of fabric between them for him do it properly, so he kneels in front of the desk chair and swivels her to face him, draping both her legs over his shoulders, and lets her bend to stroke his hair and languidly kiss his mouth as he gathers her dress in his hands and pulls it up over her head. Next he unfastens the brassiere, taking a moment to stroke her breasts as he shucks it off her, and then the drawers and garter belt go too. Finally he takes her by the hips and pulls her to the edge of the oaken seat.

Arms loosely clasping her waist he leans his forehead on her belly, deeply inhaling the rich scent of her naked body, letting it suffuse him like a drug. Then, giddy with desire, he drinks directly from the source.

“Asriel, look,” she says breathlessly as he licks her. “Look at what it’s doing—that background noise—there’s more of it now, and… it isn’t noise at all… it’s… something else…” Unwilling to be distracted, he reaches up to the device and, with eyes stubbornly locked on hers, flips the switch. It dies with a low-pitched whine.

She gives him an unusually shrewd look for a woman on the verge of orgasm.

Graceful as a butterfly alighting, she slides off the chair and into his lap, coaxing him to lie back and dropping wet kisses over him from above, until he captures her in his arms and rolls her underneath him. Taking a fistful of her hair to hold her in place he drags his teeth in pink streaks across her throat and collarbone. Her narrow hands sneak between his arms to unbutton his shirt and slip the suspenders off his shoulders, to pull up the undershirt and stroke his bare chest, and then their mouths are fastened together again and she pushes him down to the floor. Asriel finds himself on his back in the middle of the red Adraskan rug, kicking away his trousers with Marisa perched atop him. A beatific smile spreads across her lips and, gloriously warm and soft, she engulfs him like an incoming tide.

Fucking him with little grinding movements of her hips, she leans down to his ear and speaks low as if she’s telling him a secret. “We could destroy them all, you and I. Hang every stinking monarch and pontiff in the street. Lay waste to every oratory, burn every palace to the ground with the unquenchable flames of truth.” Her voice rises in pitch as she utters these shocking heresies, and her breathing grows husky and uneven. “We could fling wide the doors of heaven and hell, together…. Forge a world where nothing is forbidden…. We could become as gods… Ah!” Her sweet face twists with a half-swallowed wail, her hands clench suddenly, nails digging into his shoulders, so that he feels as well as watches, fascinated, as her sins are transmuted into overwhelming pleasure.

Once he’s sure she’s had her fill he grabs her head and pulls her close to kiss her, and when he opens his eyes her ecstatic smile has turned vicious. She's revealed more of herself than she'd meant to, he realizes, and now she won't be satisfied until he repays her in kind. Kneeling between his legs, one hand splayed on his breast to keep him down, she bends and sucks him, but before he’s fully adjusted to this new form of stimulation she switches him to her hand and asks casually, “Remind me again how long you’ll be gone for.” Her mouth goes back to his cock while she waits for an answer.

He knows this game and doesn’t particularly want to play it. She wants to prove that she won’t miss him, that his absence means nothing to her. She wants to hear his voice splintering with need for her when he speaks. She wants to show him she can hurt him, and make him admit he's hers to hurt. He’s already decided he won’t.

“Three months,” he responds, willing himself to be calm, but the root of her tongue moves against his frenulum, somewhere deep in her throat, as she licks the base of his cock and his mind begins to wander.

“Are you sure that will be long enough?”

“Long enough? Yes, I think it…” As he’s talking, she smears a wad of saliva onto her fingertips. She’s still sucking him languidly when he feels her nails lightly scraping down his perineum, and then she spreads her spit there and slips a finger inside him.

It’s an unexpected sensation, though not an unfamiliar one—he was at Eton, for god’s sake—but then she’s full of surprises today, and he loves to be surprised. A quiet moan comes out when he tries to speak and it takes real effort to find his voice again. “It should give me enough time to… to take…” There's a twitch in her cheek that might be a smirk. With the same cool proficiency with which she discovered the faults in his circuits, she now probes deeper, patiently beckoning, searching for the spot that’s going to wreck him.

“To take what, darling?”

“To take the…” He can’t remember and it doesn’t matter at all because the ground is shaking and the sky is falling in; stars are crashing around his head, impaling him on beams of light. He spasms on her, in her, and when it starts he feels her smile break like dawn around him. Into her lovely throat he erupts with what must be divine fire.

Out of breath and glowing like a marathon runner, long and golden in the afternoon light, Marisa lays down quietly at his side. A delicious languor permeates his senses, and he turns to her, naked as he’s ever felt, and sees her pupils blown out at the sight of him, and knows that his have done the same for her. Stelmaria sprawls under her half-bent legs. The monkey nestles at Asriel's shoulder. Every truth of the universe they discover in each other’s presence is mirrored in a truth of the body. He smooths the damp hair off of her flushed face.

“I never had an ounce of faith before,” she murmurs. “Not one bit, not really. But with you… sometimes I think, I could believe, even in spite of myself. Another world… Will you really do it? Do you really think you can, truly?”

“I do. I will. Yes, it’s absolutely true.”

“ _Quid est veritas_ ,” she says automatically, and her eyes which had been bright with hope cloud over.

Shivering, she presses her face into his shoulder, and he strokes her hair and thinks about not about her faith but her heartbeat. After awhile she says, “You’ll forget all about me while you’re gone, won’t you? Don’t lie about it.”

“In all probability, yes. I’ll be occupied every waking second with work that takes my full concentration. I’ll more or less put England out of mind entirely. Anything not related to the task immediately at hand.”

“That sounds…” She sighs. “Actually, it sounds wonderful.”

“Yes. But Marisa, you mustn’t think that I—“

“For God’s sake, don’t explain. It’s degrading." He clenches his jaw and stifles the foolish words he might have said. The thing between them is no abstraction, after all—it exists in physical space, pitiless and massive as a star. Like all invisible things, it must be described through its effects or not at all. She continues with pointed nonchalance: "At any rate I’m sure that’s for the best. You could think of me at the wrong time and go tumbling off a cliff.”

If he didn’t know better, he might think she likes the idea.

**Author's Note:**

> "Lucretia My Reflection" by Sisters of Mercy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuezNswtRfo
> 
> The accidental invention in this story is loosely based on the real-world accidental discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. All the science is greatly simplified because I myself am greatly simple when it comes to science. More technical-minded folks (that's almost anybody) are encouraged to suggest improvements.
> 
> More info about the discovery of CMB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_cosmic_microwave_background_radiation


End file.
